National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education
Program Standards
For
Elementary Teacher
Preparation
Part I: Standards for Candidates
Preparing to Teach Elementary
Students
A. INTRODUCTION
A perspective on teaching elementary students
New candidates for elementary teaching must be committed to elementary students and
their learning. They must be prepared to act on a belief that all elementary students have
potential for learning rigorous content and achieving high standards. The Committee
interprets the phrase, "all elementary children" to be inclusive, comprising students of
diverse ethnicity, race, language, religion, socioeconomic status, gender, regional or
geographic origin, and those with exceptional learning needs.
A consensus has been developing over the past two decades--informed by research and
tested through practice--about what qualities of knowledge and skill, or what
"performances" the nation expects of teachers. This growing consensus served as the
foundation for the 1996 report of the National Commission on Teaching and America's
Future, What Matters Most: Teaching for America's Future. It is exhibited in the work of
the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards (NBPTS) for recognizing
accomplished teachers, and of the Interstate New Teacher Assessment and Support
Consortium (INTASC) for teacher licensure. Many efforts of groups, projects,
associations, and teacher education institutions to improve the quality, rigor, and content
of teacher education programs build on this consensus as well. Put briefly, the consensus
is that teacher knowledge is central to student success. The Commission report stated it
this way:
What teachers know and do is the most important influence on what students learn. Competent and caring teaching should be a student right.
Research has discovered a great deal about effective teaching and learning: We
know that students learn best when new ideas are connected to what they already
know and have experienced; when they are actively engaged in applying and
testing their knowledge using real-world problems; when their learning is
organized around clear, high goals with lots of practice in reaching them; and
when they can use their own interests and strengths as springboards for learning.
When teachers can work together to build a coherent learning experience for
students throughout the grades and within and across subject areas--one that is
guided by common curriculum goals and expectations--they are able to engender
greater student achievement.
We also know that expert teachers use knowledge about children and their
learning to fashion lessons that connect ideas to students' experiences. They
create a wide variety of learning opportunities that make subject matter come
alive for young people who learn in very different ways. They know how to
support students' continuing development and motivation to achieve while
creating incremental steps that help students progress toward more complicated
ideas and performances. They know how to diagnose sources of problems in
students' learning and how to identify strengths on which to build. These skills
make the difference between teaching that creates learning and teaching that just
marks time.
Needless to say, this kind of teaching requires high levels of knowledge and skill.
To be effective, teachers must know their subject matter so thoroughly that they
can present it in a challenging, clear, and compelling way. They must also know
how their students learn and how to make ideas accessible so that they can
construct successful "teachable moments." Research confirms that teacher
knowledge of subject matter, student learning, and teaching methods are all
important elements of teacher effectiveness.
The Commission went on to say:
To help diverse learners master much more challenging content, teachers must go
far beyond dispensing information, giving a test, and assigning a grade. They
must themselves know more about the foundations of subject areas, and they must
understand how students think as well as when they know in order to create
experiences that produce learning. Moreover, as students with a wider range of
learning needs enter and stay in school--a growing number whose first language is
not English, many others with learning differences, and others with learning
disabilities--teachers need access to the growing knowledge that exists about how
to teach these learners effectively.
Alignment with INTASC
The NCATE elementary teaching accreditation standards Drafting Committee shared the
Commission's perspective. The Committee sought to make its work compatible with
INTASC and the states as they develop licensure standards and performance assessments.
Many states have already made use of the INTASC standards, which are developed to be
congruent with those of the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards, and
several states are participating in INTASC developmental projects for portfolio
assessments and a test-of-teacher-knowledge. The Committee learned that states did not
want NCATE standards that were incompatible with INTASC and state work--and the
Committee wanted to avoid such a result as well. Moreover, institutions did not want to
face the prospects of differing or conflicting standards as they attempted to prepare their
teacher candidate graduates for state licensure on the one hand and their institution for
NCATE accreditation on the other. For these reasons, the Committee decided to build its
standards around the INTASC framework as presented in its 1992 publication, Model
Standards for Beginning Teacher Licensing and Development: A Resource for State
Dialogue.
Developmental Foundations
Both INTASC and the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards give
prominence in their standards to teachers' understanding of the developmental needs and
emerging abilities of children as a fundamental requirement for effective teaching.
Understanding children and young adolescents is the foundation for NCATE curriculum
guidelines prepared by the National Association for Education of Young Children
(spanning birth through age eight) and by the National Middle School Association
(covering grades five through eight). The Committee sought to base the Program
Standards, similarly, in developmental concerns. For this reason it has placed a standard
on development first among the teacher candidate standards.
K-6 grade span
The Committee has adopted a K-6 span in its standards to serve two purposes:
First, to make a statement that there is need for elementary standards. The
developmental ages to be covered would be too great to expect of new teacher
candidates if the NMSA standards were extended down and the NAEYC
standards extended up to cover these grades. This Committee action is also
compatible with the child developmental emphasis in standards developed by
the National Board for Professional Teaching Standards. The Board has
organized its standards around ages of students, including: Early Childhood Generalist, ages 3-8; Middle Childhood Generalist, ages 7-12; and Early
Adolescence Generalist, ages 11-15. With the Committee's elementary
standards, NCATE would have three overlapping sets of generalist
standards--for early childhood (NAEYC), elementary, and grades 5-9
(NMSA)--similar to the NBPTS arrangement.
Second, to be practical for use across states with differing licensure grade-span
requirements. Many states still license on a K-6 basis, so K-6 standards will
frequently be compatible with state practice. But the intentional overlap with
NAEYC standards at the younger ages and NMSA standards at the upper
elementary level also means that teacher education programs can draw the
guidance they need from one or more of the developmentally-based trio of
NCATE standards in order to accommodate state licensure grade grouping
patterns.
B. STANDARDS
Structure of the standards
In the pages below, each Committee standard begins with a number, or number/letter,
designation and is printed in bold face type. The text of these standards is taken
principally from language of the INTASC model standards, but (1) elaborates, in the
development standard, on INTASC, (2) provides additions, in the curriculum section,
emphasizing underlying concepts, structures and modes of inquiry for elementary
teaching subject knowledge, and (3) gives separate emphasis to families in the
professionalism standard. In framing the standards, the Committee made decisions about
the range of knowledge and abilities that candidates should master and also about the
structure of the Part I standards:
The curriculum portion of the standards is built around academic disciplines.
The Committee views core academic disciplines as enduring structures to
understand knowledge, as means of representing the content of knowledge,
and as ways to comprehend substantive issues. The Committee decided that
an alternative to organize curriculum standards around problems would not be
a useful move because problems change over time. Moreover, problems can
best be understood through the lenses provided by traditional disciplines.
The language of the standards is intentionally written in a common style.
Candidates are expected to "know," as a threshold, but also to "understand" in
a more comprehensive, thorough way that permits interpretation of the content
in each standard. Candidates must also be able to apply their knowledge and
understanding of content to teaching all elementary students so that those
students develop as knowledgeable, responsible, and caring individuals.
The standards are followed by supporting explanations that describe what
Drafting Committee members believe is important within each topic, with an
emphasis on what elementary students are expected to learn. These
paragraphs can guide both candidates and institutions as to NCATE's
expectations for the content dimension of candidate information in a
performance-based program review.
Finally, each section of the standards concludes with references to source
documents used by the Committee in preparing the Program Standards. The
first group of references, below, lists material pertinent to all topics covered
by the elementary teacher accreditation standards. For assistance to faculty
who are building and strengthening their elementary teacher programs, these
and other publications may be identified through the ACEI web site
(www.acei.org), as well as on the web sites for many of the
NCATE constituent organizations whose representatives participated in
writing the Program Standards.
Throughout these pages the Committee has chosen definitions for terms to convey
specific meanings. The phrases "all children," "elementary students" and "K-6 students"
are meant to be inclusive, comprising children of diverse ethnicity, race, language,
religion, socioeconomic status, gender, regional or geographic origin, and children with
exceptional learning needs. They are also intended to be inclusive of young adolescents
who are enrolled in upper elementary grades. The term "specialists" is interpreted
broadly by the Committee to include teaching specialists, special educators, teachers of
English as a second language, librarians, counselors and other school resource personnel.
To avoid confusion, students preparing to teach are referred to consistently as
"candidates" or "teacher candidates," while elementary pupils are referred to as students,
elementary students, or children.
Connections among the standards
The Committee urges that institutions prepare elementary teaching candidates to find and
make connections among the standards. The text in standard 2.i emphasizes such
connections within the curricular subject areas. The standards and explanations also
incorporate numerous references to instruction that are specific to curricular areas, as
well as references throughout to relationships among developmental knowledge and
instruction. In fact, there are overlapping and close relationships among all the standards
across development, curricular, instructional, assessment, and professionalism topics.
Readers will also find emphasis on these connections in Part III on qualities of
performance evidence.
Content Copyright 
2000 by the National Council for Accreditation of Teacher Education.
All rights reserved
Format and Programming Copyright 2000 by the Association for Childhood Education International.
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